It is also systematically underfunding health systems – and foreign assistance – such that there is no doubt there will be too few health workers, too few medicines, too few ambulances, too little accountability to significantly cut the toll of mothers dying and robustly respond to the innumerable other causes of death and disability. It is walking past a homeless person asking for help without even acknowledging her presence. It is knowing that thousands of people die every day of easily avoidable causes, but living your life as though oblivious to that reality, except perhaps an occasional gift to charity. It is being transfixed by last November’s terrorist attacks in Paris while moving on after reading a headline last week about an even deadlier marketplace attack in Baghdad. Indifference is both individual and societal. In a memorable 2005 editorial, the New York Times reported, “Yesterday, more than 20,000 people perished of extreme poverty.” John Lewis and his colleagues took the dramatic step of holding a sit-in on the floor of the House of Representatives to try to force a vote on meaningful legislation to address gun violence. The normalization of terror, the seductiveness of indifference, and the ever-present need to struggle against it demands that we constantly, actively rouse our consciousness. The normalization of suffering means that inequities can continue to be responsible for more than one in three deaths globally without producing global outrage, despite the monstrous toll of the epidemic of health inequity – 17-20 million people per year. Gun violence, with more than 30,000 Americans per year lost to gun homicide and suicide, fails to stir Congress to act. We read on the front pages of our newspapers about the world’s indifference to ISIS attacks in Baghdad that slaughter hundreds of people. Perhaps the greatest cause of indifference in today’s world, the normalization of terror – whether the terror of another terrorist attack, another mass casualty bombing, or the terror of a mother and her family as she hemorrhages uncontrollably after childbirth, soon to become one of a quarter million-plus women who die from pregnancy- or childbirth-related complications every year, with almost all such deaths preventable. In a 1965 speech, Martin Luther King, Jr., called “the greatest tragedy of this period…not the vitriolic words and other violent actions of the bad people but the appalling silence and indifference of the good people.” I expect that is why other great advocates for human rights have emphasized the danger of indifference. The depth of the harm of indifference comes from how easy, and thus how pervasive, it is. And in denying their humanity, we betray our own. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees – not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. Ndifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor – never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. Indifference reduces the Other to an abstraction…. Their hidden or even visible anguish is of no interest. And, therefore, their lives are meaningless. Yet, for the person who is indifferent, his or her neighbor are of no consequence. It is, after all, awkward, troublesome, to be involved in another person’s pain and despair. It is so much easier to avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes. It is so much easier to look away from victims. Of course, indifference can be tempting – more than that, seductive. In a 1999 White House address raising the perils of indifference, Elie Wiesel offered these reflections: In a word, that was the enduring evil against which Elie Wiesel – the Nobel Peace Laureate and Auschwitz survivor who died earlier this month – struggled, indifference to avoidable anguish. Elie Wiesel speaks at a UN General Assembly special session in 2005 commemorating the Holocaust.
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